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Features / Usability

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    • Which Wiki?

    Posted by Paul posts: 22 United Kingdom

    I've been trying for a while to get my lot to consider Tiki Wiki as a colobrative tool. Good news, funding (for the hardware) and a green light to set up recently received. biggrin Bad news, some bright spark says "Whats the difference between the Wiki's" so they look on Wikipedia only to find Tiki Wiki is not listed frown. Back to the drawing board. mad

    Sometimes it is difficult to get out of bed! Paul

    Reads: 1047
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    Posted by Bernhard posts: 104

    > I've been trying for a while to get my lot to consider Tiki Wiki as a colobrative tool. Good news, funding (for the hardware) and a green light to set up recently received. biggrin Bad news, some bright spark says "Whats the difference between the Wiki's" so they look on Wikipedia only to find Tiki Wiki is not listed frown. Back to the drawing board. mad

    This is probably, because people sometimes don't know in which box TikiWiki fits.

    For more complete comparison of CMSs and Wikis take a look at: http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

    One common thing is that most people consider TikiWiki to be more CMS than a Wiki. What is what? There is much confusion about what features a CMS, Blog system, Portal site, etc has to implement.

    I found that TikiWiki is not perfect. In fact it's missing some basic stuff. But it is the best full integrated groupware solution I found. And it's wiki based. I state "wiki based" as most features come from the wiki idea and are bundled with other CMS ideas.

    Soooo, TikiWiki is a little bit of everything. The most interesting points to me are listed below:

    • It's a wiki, as you can easily edit text in wiki like syntax. You can create pages by just placing a reference to it in the text.
    • It's not a wiki, because it features a lot of community stuff, like forum, blogging, chat. In this way it's more of a portal site.
    • It features some nice CMS features like articles, structuring of content, gategories and a (IMHO too sophisticated) detailed rights management
    • It lacks however basic, important and common CMS features like a publishing workflow (something any other CMS will offer you).
    • It is not element based (which I prefer), this means, your text is a text and not built up of e.g. a headline component followed by a text compontent followed by a table followed by, etc (like e.g. in Typo3)
    • And I very much like this approach to bundle all "features" together with the installation. No hazzle to find the right "module" to integrate a certain feature you might be missing (like Joomla/Mambo/Drupal, etc).


    Your mileage may very, but I can live with it and I still did not find something better for free.

    If the forum would be more sophisticated and there would be a publishing workflow, it would be perfect and I'd even would pay for it ;-)

    Best regards, Bernhard

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    Posted by Paul posts: 22 United Kingdom

    Thanks (I think) Bernhard.

    I said before, for every new thing I learn something has to get pushed out. Your link has deleted about a weeks worth of knowledge!

    Your points are well made, the only draw back I see is to add something to this flavour you have to learn a new language (Smarty) which is a bit of an overhead if you want to do something simple ~ add a bit of javascript to the page footer for example.

    What advantage is a publishing workflow to this style of enviroment?

    Thanks for the time to reply. Paul

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    Posted by Bernhard posts: 104

    > Your points are well made, the only draw back I see is to add something to this flavour you have to learn a new language (Smarty) which is a bit of an overhead if you want to do something simple ~ add a bit of javascript to the page footer for example.

    This one is not as big. I don't know smarty. I don't know PHP (well enough). I only know basic HTML+CSS and still was able to modify the templates to get a new look for my site (it is http://www.mac-o-net.de/).

    In comparison to other systems, it's nearly the same. Basically you have to modify CSS stylesheets to configure your site to a new look. To add something to pages or to modify the way content is output, every other system get's more complicated. In either way you have to edit some template files written in all different ways. (PHPTemplate, Smarty, Xtemplate, custom ...). The way TikiWiki works is not too much different than other stystems.

    > What advantage is a publishing workflow to this style of enviroment?

    Hm, I don't quite get this question. To me a publishing workflow is important as I'm publishing an online documentation and book project. In this scenario, whenever wiki pages (everything in TikiWiki is a wiki page somehow) get modified, administrators get notified about this change by e-mail. But the change is immediatly published and available to the public!

    I don't like this. I need an editor to review any change before it get's published. And I want to have multiple editors for different kind of content categories. All this is not possible with TikiWiki. This is o.k. to my site, as there are not many publishers and editors and all is quite good controllable at this size.

    I'm only stuck to TikiWiki, because all others are not better considering ALL the functionality of a site. I want ease of management and if one or two features don't work perfectly but all the rest is o.k. this is better. E.g. I'm considering to get rid of the forum and replace it with e.g. vBulletin, but these are future steps. To get started with any groupware/portalsite/wiki/whatever, TikiWiki is one of the best choices out there (if not THE best anyway).

    Best regards, Bernhard

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    Posted by Paul posts: 22 United Kingdom

    >> a new look for my site (it is http://www.mac-o-net.de/).

    Nice template, Bernhard.

    You missed my point slightly ~ I have an external page hits tracker that needs some script on every page tracked. On HTML sites it is easy to add this to the template, on a Tiki site I lack the smarts to do it, even although it is a very simple code snippet. If I want to do this I will have to go back to "Hello World" in Smarty. cry

    > > What advantage is a publishing workflow to this style of environment?
    >
    > Hm, I don't quite get this question.

    OK, you are talking traditional publishing and, in that context, your comments are right. Wiki's, as I understand them, do wrest control from an "author" so style and content quality can vary however, again as I understand it, the bigger the Wiki-base the more constant the style and content evolves. This webcast illustrates the point nicely ~ although I agree, nobody can do it as well as the current author (especially when thats me biggrin )

    Regards Paul

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    Posted by Bernhard posts: 104

    > >> a new look for my site (it is http://www.mac-o-net.de/).
    >
    > Nice template, Bernhard.
    >
    > You missed my point slightly ~ I have an external page hits tracker that needs some script on every page tracked. On HTML sites it is easy to add this to the template, on a Tiki site I lack the smarts to do it, even although it is a very simple code snippet. If I want to do this I will have to go back to "Hello World" in Smarty. cry

    No no. No worries! This is simple. I've just tried it myself with your external statcount provider.

    You just edit a common template file. E.g. I used the template which controls the header portion of every page displayed by TikiWiki (header.tpl). Smarty is not a different language. It is just mixed with HTML code. The Smarty engine will just interpret the smarty codes and replace them with valid HTML. You can therefore read a TikiWiki Smarty template file like plain HTML and just ignore all the Smarty stuff. If you know programming in C its like using a pre-processor.

    E.g. I added the code provided by the counter program directly after the tag, and it just works. No need to learn Smarty.

    Best regards - Bernhard

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